Various health problems reported by people after receiving one of the COVID-19 vaccine shots are more likely to have been caused by the vaccines than to be coincidental, according to an analysis of data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
VAERS has been flooded with more than 1 million reports of various health problems and more than 21,000 death reports since the introduction of the vaccines in late 2020. Some experts and public officials have downplayed the significance of the reports, noting that just because a health problem occurs after getting the vaccine doesn’t mean the problem was caused by it.
However, a deeper analysis of the data indicates that many of the adverse effects are more than just a coincidence, according to Jessica Rose, a computational biologist who’s been studying the data for at least nine months.
“The safety signals being thrown off in VAERS now are off the charts across the board,” Rose told The Epoch Times.
There are multiple ways to parse the data in order to flesh out whether the causal link between an adverse event and the vaccination is real or illusory. For example, multiple COVID-19 vaccines come in two doses. A random adverse event unrelated to the vaccine should be dose-agnostic. A stroke randomly coinciding with a vaccination shouldn’t be picky about which dose it was.
In the VAERS data, however, a number of the reported problems are dose-dependent. Myocarditis in teenagers is reported several times more often after the second vaccine dose than after the first dose. Following a vaccine booster shot, in contrast, the frequency is significantly lower than after the first dose, Rose found.
Other researchers and health authorities have already acknowledged that the shots are associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis, especially in teenage boys, although they usually also say the risk is low.
Yet dose-dependency shows up in the VAERS data for other problems as well, including fainting and dizziness, which are more common after the first dose.
Rose acknowledged that statistical analysis seldom provides definitive answers. For instance, there could be some unknown factor that leads to more reports of unrelated health events after the first or second vaccine dose. In her view, however, the data leans away from such a conclusion.
Previous research shows that the majority of VAERS reports are filed by medical staff, who shouldn’t fail to report adverse events based on which dose is being administered. To Rose, it seems more likely that if people suffer health problems after an injection of a novel substance and if the problems substantially change between the first and the second shot, the substance probably had something to do with it.
“In lieu of being able to explain this happening for any other reason, it satisfies the dose-response point quite well, in my opinion,” she said of the myocarditis results.
As for why the reports dropped after the vaccine “booster” shots, Rose said she hasn’t found a definitive explanation. It could be that people who didn’t feel well after the first two shots would think twice about getting more. As such, those most at risk for an adverse reaction would be less likely to get the booster.
She arrived at the results after she evaluated the VAERS data from the perspective of the Bradford Hill criteria—a set of nine questions that are used by epidemiologists to determine whether any given factor is likely the cause of an observed health effect. She said she found evidence to answer all of the questions positively.
